As many of you doubtless know by now, Google's first Android 5.0 devices ship with full-disk encryption enabled out of the box - encryption that can't be disabled without flashing a new ROM to the device. We've heard from at least one source that this encryption shouldn't really affect on-device performance noticeably, but new benchmarks from Anandtech seem to suggest otherwise.

The heavily tech-focused review and news site didn't publish storage benchmarks for the Nexus 6 in their review, because the app used - Androbench - was deemed to be producing inaccurate results on Lollipop devices (and it definitely is). They tried another app that allegedly shouldn't run into these problems, called ANDEBench PRO (which I think is about to get a lot more downloads).

Anandtech also got something no one else yet has: a Nexus 6 running official software with encryption disabled. Anandtech was sent this device by Motorola, and it's the only test we've yet seen of a Nexus 6 without encryption. The results potentially indicate that what some of you had feared about Android's new encryption appears to be true: it's going to considerably affect eMMC (NAND storage) performance.

For posterity, I ran the same benchmark on a Nexus 7 (2013) running Lollipop, as well as a Nexus 9. Here are Anandtech's results next to my own.

My own results do add some confusion here - but they may have an explanation.

Both NVIDIA's Tegra K1 Denver and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805 support some form of hardware AES and SHA encryption/decryption, though I believe the implementations are not identical. Denver uses the ARMv8 architecture, which has native AES and SHA support as part of its instruction set. The Snapdragon 805, meanwhile, achieves its own hardware-level AES support using a proprietary cryptographic module developed by Qualcomm.

My strong suspicion is that these two solutions were not created equally. Qualcomm's processor roadmap has struggled to make the leap to ARMv8-based chips at the high end of the market, with the company having shifted much of its current release schedule to push 64-bit mid-range and low-end chips in Asia and Europe. Though those chips are using the ARMv8 instruction set, their cores are based on standard ARM reference designs. Meanwhile, the top-tier Krait core still uses ARMv7, thus pushing Qualcomm into offering some form of hardware encrypt/decrypt while its next-gen 64-bit core is still in development.

Edit: So it turns out this may not be far from the truth. Apparently, Google has not merged the various drivers that optimize Qualcomm's QCE module for encryption and decryption into AOSP. The generally-assumed reason is that this code is proprietary. Without these optimizations, the Nexus 6's hardware decryption module on the Snapdragon 805 is essentially hamstrung.

This is just one possible explanation, though - there could be others. Still, it seems like the most reasonable one we have at the moment, given that the Nexus 9 hasn't otherwise gotten much of a reputation as a performer.

The real question we have to ask is whether or not any of these storage benchmarks really matter on a mobile device. After all, the number of intensive storage I/O operations being done on smartphones and tablets is still relatively low, and some of the situations where NAND slowdowns are really going to have an effect can be offset by holding things in memory. Still, it does appear that, at least for the Nexus 6, encryption isn't doing it any favors in the performance department.

Comments

blindexecutioner

I was reading on XDA that it isn't too hard to disable it. A guy even posted a modified boot.img you can flash to disable it. If I get a Nexus 6 it's the first thing I will do after unlocking the bootloader. Updates will require another step but oh well. That's what is great about Nexus devices.

mikebel3

That's what's great about Nexus devices? Really?

Nathan Walters

Yeah. Most people may not want to disable encryption, but if the user wants it, the option is there. The same can't be said for many devices on the market.

mikebel3

My takeaway is that Google's implementation of encryption is not ready for prime time. The fact that you have to take a cumbersome step to fix it does NOT make the Nexus great.

Aooga

You totally missed the point. What's great about nexus devices is that you CAN disable it. Not that you have to because google messed it up. No one is denying that.

Nathan Walters

The jury is still out on whether or not it's even an issue. You may not be seeing 100MB/s read speeds, but in everyday usage, that probably isn't much of an issue.

Aooga

Yeah I guess, but if it is really slower than the Nexus 5, I would consider than an issue. (I don't even own a Nexus 6, just going by reports)

Husain Aljamal

Its not necessarily slower when it cones to browsing or stuff like that but when u close apps or use google now etc it is slower plus the ui is generally smoother feeling than the nexus 6

Husain Aljamal

Its is I have the nexus 6 and i can ssay with no doubt when it comes to read and write data functionality it is slower than the nexus 5 with lollipop and a a lot more obvious when comparing he nexus 5 kitkat

tehdef

Dont agree. With it being a contract/subsidized phone, it's going to hit a wider audience, and they will have NO CLUE why their phone is slow as balls.

Husain Aljamal

Lmao its not that slow and considering the nexus 5 is faster than the iohon 6/6+ its not that big of an issue for regular customers but for us when we know the performance could be much better it really pisses me off

Ur source compares an s5 and an m8 both have older processors plus nexus are pure android even with encryption the n6 runs faster than the 6/6+ I can make a video and show u if u would like to see

Husain Aljamal

Adding to my post the n5 runs faster than any phone including the n6 without encryption so yes the n5 destroys the iPhone without even trying

Husain Aljamal

At least in speed lol

tralalalalalala40

Ya it sucks because they will all come to the conclusion 'oh ya, android is just laggy, but at least the phone is cheap to get'

mikebel3

Fixing something using hacks doesn't make it a device great. Most anything can be hacked to do something different, what would make it great is if it didn't need to be hacked in the first place in order for it to perform at its best. That is some Apple level marketing BS. "It's a feature! We cripple devices so you can learn how to hack it!"

mikebel3

Not to mention that hacking it would require you to root the device as well as possibly unlock the bootloader which in most cases voids warranty.

Ethan G

Encryption by its very nature will slow down the device. It's not that it's not ready for primetime, it's that it's interacting with the data in real time. They might be able to cache the process or something, but even then it would create a potential vulnerability. Quite simply this is just Google reacting to "Android Security Vulnerabilities" by taking a hard stance. Fortunately as mentioned before we have the ability to make encryption optional via flashing an .img, but it should have been an option from Google and not one that needed to be created by the community.

I'd hardly call flashing a replacement boot.img an "option." That's a firmware mod. Also, remember, once you flash a new boot.img, you won't get any OTAs until you flash back to the stock boot.img, meaning erasing your device. That sounds like so much fun and convenience.

Grayson

That new restore feature on setup could come in handy. Speaking of that, is AP planning to do a detailed review of that feature? I would like to know exactly what all it restores (which apps, which settings), how long it takes, and if it actually works or if it misses some stuff. Before Lollipop, the backup and restore was extremely hit or miss, and mostly useless.

Actually it is done very well on Apple hardware. There's no performance impact, and encryption is on / off depending on if you have screen lock on / off. If you turn it off, you don't need to wipe the device (but obviously you need the passcode).

John Doe

How do you know that there is no performance impact? Did you recently conduct tests on an unencrypted iphone 6 or 6+?

Okay... there's no noticeable performance impact. If I have to run benchmarking software to pick up on it, who cares?

John Doe

Exactly thats the same thing with the nexus 6 they had to do the benchmarking on an unencrypted nexus 6 to see that it impacts read and write speed. You would also see the same thing with the iphone 6 without encryption but there is no iphone 6 without encryption.

b

Most XDA members might want to disable this.
However, I prefer higher security over higher performance.

Fatty Bunter

If you want to go to the extreme and get maximum security with no performance you could always just break your phone in half.

usaff22

I'm just surprised at how the Nexus 5's NAND performance has degraded from KitKat to Lollipop, even with encryption disabled...

I'm wondering if this depends on the phone? My Nexus 7 (2013) and Nexus 4 both are a bit faster on Lollipop where as on KitKat, they were slower (the Nexus 4 especially).

HeCareth

Honestly you can't. The benchmark spec crazed Android community is going nuts for something that probably doesn't even matter. Encryption causes raw performance loss. This is normal, the question is does it matter? Anandtech should have ran the same test with a Nexus 5 with encryption enabled. I will run it myself and see what I find

EowynCarter

Expect that, according to those who tested the device, it do show in actual use.

Husain Aljamal

Honestly my nexus 6 is faster than the nexus 5 in browsing or loading emails but it is slower when it comes to stuff like google now, closing apps and just the smoothness of the ui in general. And the test is definitely accurate, at least in my experience, when it shows 4.4 is faster than 5.0 on nexus 5

Grayson

Yeah, wondering if the newer firmware / driver has a bug. That may get fixed at some point. Either way, my Nexus 5 feels faster on Lollipop, so I'm happy.

There'll be a an OTA eventually because the 7 (and 5, I believe) both have trouble playing video.

Mindsunwound

My encrypted nexus five on lollipop seems to do everything it did on KitKat including play video streaming, or from file at 1080p just fine. Granted I am not a benchmark program, so what is good enough for me is not necessarily as fast as a buttered cat down a metal slide.

Daniel Serodio

I'm planning to encrypt mine; as the owner of an encrypted Nexus 5 w/ Lollipop, can you run the mentioned benchmarks and publish your results? I'd be really grateful.

Mindsunwound

I ran the benchmark twice, but each time it crashed between the final test and displaying the results.

mobilemann

I just went to a 6+. Enjoying no speed penalty, and full encryption:D

mattcoz

Mine feels much slower, wonder if this is related.

Matthew DesOrmeaux

Mine feels much, MUCH slower. Sometimes I wait several seconds between app switches, or even to bring up the switcher at all.

Fatty Bunter

This most of all. This is the one thing that nobody has accounted for yet.

I haven't applied the Lollipop OTA update to my Nexus 5 yet because of all the bugs, UI issues, and now this... Does it encrypt your phone by default and need to turn it off after (assume don't need root) or do you have a choice at install?

rmkilc

It doesn't encrypt by default. This is only on devices that originally ship with 5.0

Leonardo Baez

1) encryption is not enabled by default when you update your n5
2) I updated 2 days ago my n5 to 5.0 and i found 0 of the reported errors

rmkilc

3) enabled encryption and now I wish I hadn't :)

Danny Lewis

Google only enforces encryption on the N6 and N9. I left it disabled on my N5. Lollipop is running smoothly and nicely. I installed the factory image and wiped it and on my wife's I installed the OTA. Went smoothly and both phones are running fine.

avi

and all of the devices coming with factory Lollipop will have this FDE enabled,,, better to have a device now and update it latter

Donatom3

I liked my N5 way better on Lollipop than I did on Kit Kat.
My brother complained when he first upgraded to Lollipop about it being slow. Guess what, about 6 hours later with no intervention from him the phone was running better than on Kit Kat.

Brandon Smith

I understand that encryption is important and obviously slower to read, but Google really should have given the user an on/off switch. These benchmarks are insane and there's no reason that my mom should use a slower phone due to something she really doesn't need.

Apple is using ARMv8 AES/SHA support, Qualcomm isn't. Also, there is no "option" to decrypt the Nexus 6 or 9. You have to flash a custom boot.img (which bars you from future OTA updates), erase the device, and then you'll run unecrypted. That's a pretty lame "option."

rmkilc

You should encrypt your Nexus 7 on 5.0 and see how it compares to no encryption. Same with Nexus 5. That's a lot of work though...

Will Tisdale

Yes it is a lame option. I'm hoping with the revelations about performance hit and the ensuing fuss push Google to provide a way of making the encryption optional instead of mandatory.

Hmm, did you reply based on an email? I edited the link in afterwards, so you might not have seen that.

This wouldn't be the first time Qualcomm hardware isn't fully supported by AOSP. Qualcomm's Krait bionic optimizations in CAF (which are Apache-licensed last I checked, so Google COULD use them) showed up around 4.2 or so, and Google hadn't yet integrated all of them as of 4.4.

Qualcomm also has a bunch of other tweaks (such as a pimped Dalvik - not sure what the status of some of their tweaks is with ART) that were always closed-source and not something Google was willing to license for Nexus devices.

I'm not sure if dm-req-crypt has any proprietary dependencies that could allow lawyers to gum up the works.

In this website, it's never Google's fault. Always some else to blame. You're funny.

tralalalalalala40

Apple upped the ante, and google stupidly fell for it. Apple has the security advantage when it really isn't necessary since facebook knows as much as the NSA.

Android Developer

It's impossible to disable it?

Kash Khan

Not impossible, just a little daunting for those who are less tech savvy.

The instructions are very clear and I managed to do it in a couple minutes. But a word of warning, it WILL wipe everything on your phone.

Android Developer

Isn't it just a switch somewhere in the "security" settings screen ?

Kash Khan

That's only to turn it on, not turn it off (at least that's the case on the Nexus 6 since it comes encrypted out of the box).

Android Developer

I'm confused.
I thought that it's enabled by default, and that you can just disable it just like you always could via this "security" settings screen (just like you could enable it on previous versions).

Kash Khan

If it was as simple as that, people wouldn't be so upset about it. You have to disable it in the bootloader, and then wipe the entire device since all the files had been encrypted. This is why it's best to disable encryption right out of the box since you're going to end up with a factory reset.

Android Developer

Odd.
What happens for people who have upgraded their OS from Kitkat then? Does their data get encrypted?

Kash Khan

It's not enabled by default for people who upgrade, only devices where Lollipop comes pre-installed. The switch is there for upgraders.

just send it back, with a note why, and google might learn not to be sooo stupid.

usaff22

I doubt they'd read, or care about the note

jonathan3579

It really shouldn't affect your day to day experience.

Alucard291

but it really will once you start running low-ish on nand space. That's the issue. It will run just fine (just like it does on nexus 7 2012) until you're down to the last couple of gigs. And then it will actually stop and lag. For dozens of seconds at a time.

Matches Malone

This is...not good. If you're going to mandate encryption then you better have it supported via a dedicated hardware feature.

People generally don't. What you're looking for is a small subset of People, the so called Idiots.

CalH

Yep. I actually meant "Some people".

John Longson

And if you're gonna release a phone that costs $300 more than your last one, it should be a finished product? Not with radio battery drain issues or incomplete drivers?

DonEmu

So did anyone notice slow performance until they heard about these benchmarks?

mikebel3

I don't have a Nexus but I enabled encryption on my M7 and noticed a ton of lag just swiping between screens that wasn't there before. Ended up wiping and starting over without encryption. I chalked it up to my phone being older but it seems more a problem over how encryption runs.

Komeil Karimi

Exact same scenario here

Tony

Yeh if your phone doesn't support native hardware encryption seems will just slow things down I guess, good to know though.

John Bailey

The only way to encrypt on Android is if you have native hardware encryption in the first place. The only difference here is that with the N6 it has encryption enabled out of the box, Google very well could've done the same thing with the N5 because it and almost every device since Honeycomb/ICS has supported encryption at a hardware level, they just haven't chosen to enable it by default until now.

Daniel Serodio

Do you have any sources on this? AFAIK, native hardware will speedup encryption, but it's perfectly possible to encrypt your phone without it.

Defenestratus

I've had my 64gb N6 for 24 hours. Its the smoothest phone I've ever had. Mind you my phone history includes the Galaxy Nexus, and the Note 3.

Matthew Fry

Note 3 was not very smooth out of the box but it's all relative. My G3 and M7 were probably the best performing phones I've tried.

EowynCarter

Can you tell me if you can lock orientation in landscape mode ?

And what about OTG ?

Derek Robinson

Even knowing about the slow performance, I really don't feel it on my N6. Changed from an M8 and the N6 feels smoother.

me

Yes. Read a few reviews specifically saying its slower than the 5 to open apps and multitask.

Now I know why.

blakjakdavy

Ars Technica called out slow NAND in their review but did not identify encryption as the cause.

avi

thts why Anandtech is Anandtech

HeCareth

Nope not on my Nexus 5 running Lollipop, enabled encryption and have not noticed a thing

matus201

Are you sure? It's not obvious, but things like app switching and loading many tabs in chrome or game loading are definitely slower (I noticed it on my nexus 5 in about a day of using it, went back to unencrypted)

Aaron Hoyland

How do you go back to unencrypted? I've been noticing some performance issues on Lollipop, and I'd love to go back to being unencrypted if it means I can get some of that performance back.

Chris Fetters

You have to reflash the update file (can be downloaded from Google). Did you enable encryption manually? Because upgrading to lollipop on a Nexus 5 or any other phone DOES NOT enable encryption, it must be turned on manually in the settings menu. Only the N6 so far comes encrypted. The performance issues you're having are most likely related to bugs in Lollipop, namely the infamous memory leak. Restarting your phone once a day helps with that a ton

I can't speak for the 6, but on the 5 I enabled encryption the day after I went to final Lollipop and compared to the day before and the month of the dev preview, it was complete mud. Wiped it and went back to unencrypted and it's been speedy ever since.

Jason Bell

I encrypted my N10 a while ago (it was on 4.4.2, I think). It was so slow that I had to completely wipe it for it to be usable again.

Husain Aljamal

Yes definitely

mobilemann

impressive justification right there

Disconn3ct

It matters a lot. That was why I gave up on the Asus transformers, and why the original n7 is so panned..

Like how you turn off fancy Aero in Windows back when first came out for the flat/classic window animations.

The extra crap really sucks.

james fuston

I'm going to say that, to a point, this doesn't matter. We aren't talking about OG N7 slowness and the biggest application I could see would be using your phone's onboard storage as a thumb drive. And speed, again to a point, became a moot point when the N6 was graced with a USB 2 port (which I'm very thankful for, by the way).

Disconn3ct

On the terribly slow transformer, games etc worked fine. Chrome, of all things, was the biggest victim of the io performance and the thing I most use on a tablet..

james fuston

This isn't nearly as slow as the transformer was. And I can tell you firsthand that Chrome on an N6 isn't slow.

Disconn3ct

Nothing is as slow as the transformer prime (and, as far as I could tell in the 3 days I had one, the infinity.) But flash speed matters a lot - if it didn't, everyone would be have been happy with the original n7 or the transformers. When they came out, they were powerhouses....except for grinding to a halt when the flash was accessed.

james fuston

But we aren't having a conversation about NAND performance in general, we're specifically talking about encrypted Nexus devices running 5.0 in which situation the performance decrease is imperceptible (aka, doesn't matter).

It wouldn't affect gaming aside from load times. ST does not have encryption on by default, either, and I wouldn't turn it in.

Jeff Badger

Upgrades are exempt. Only if a device starts with Lollipop will encryption be turned on.

Husain Aljamal

It wouldn't effect gaming just things like closing apps or Google now, locking the device and things like that

bol

Two questions:

1. What company is behind this? google? snapdragon?

2. With encryption enabled, Can this be fixed by a software update? Or is it a hardware issue?

fsghdg

"1. What company is behind this? google? snapdragon?"

You mean whose fault it is? The answer is none of them, or both of them, you decide.
It's a no-brainer that encryption degrades performance, it simply does by how it works, but in ARMv8 architecture there's a chip dedicated to enryption, so with Snapdragon 808 and 810, encryption won't have any affect on performance, without a dedicated chip, it's always going to be slower, no matter what OS does it run or how many years they optimize thing, etc.

antonio cesar

erm no, dedicated chips dosent mean slower, if so you would say that a dedicated gpu would be slower than some integraded one. the fault IS google. ok the 805 needs proprietory blobs for its encryption to fully work but google already uses qualcomm proprietory things, such as the thermal engine (mpdecision, closed source qualcom hotplug driver) for instance, so why didnt they implement this as well?remember that nexus dosent come with aosp, but rather a google rom with some framework modifications and some proprietory things (idk the nexus 6, but atleast on the 5 it comes even with lg apps) so they dont need to be as open as possible

Wowzer, just ran the tests on my Lollipop N10, its KILLS all except the unencrypted N6.

DoesSizeMatter

Please also reference which model( how much memory) you are referring to.

After returning N7 2012 after a week of lag(first week it came out), i made sure to always buy largest size always, 32 GB N5 just incase...

asdfga

The 2012 Nexus 7 is slow, no matter what size you buy. It might be a bit better for the 16 or 32 GB version, but it's slow anyway.

Cool

Actually, the 16 Gigabyte variant was the slowest. It had the worst NAND performance.

The 8 Gigabyte had respectable performance. Well the 32 gigabyte version had the best performance of the three.

fcjan

I never understand why is everyone so scared about their privacy? It's not like your goverment reads your every SMS, email or whatever.. I guess it's US thing

Thorsten G.

You are trying to be sarcastic, aren't you?

Alucard291

You actually believe that someone somewhere sits there and reads every single message of yours?

You cannot be that stupid.

philosopher_Mk

Andoid is laggy....again.

I can't imagine how 2015 mid-range phones will run with lollipop.

kamiller42

If Google would just remove TouchWiz, it'll all be fast again.

philosopher_Mk

I heart nexus 6 is laggy to.

Leo

Whereas your trolling has always remained the same.

philosopher_Mk

I wish I was trolling.

James_C_L

Is it not possible for Google to have an option to toggle encryption on our off? I'm new here

brkshr

I notice no difference between encrypted and unencrypted on my Nexus 5.

theo

is there any way to find out if my nexus 4 (running android l) is encrypted or not?

Leif Sikorski

It should be in the settings. But as far as I know it's disabled by default on all devices that didn't shipped with Lollipop.

Leif Sikorski

"Apparently, Google has not merged the various drivers that optimize Qualcomm's QCE module for encryption and decryption into AOSP."

And that's the downside of Nexus devices for the "average" user in my opinion. Google tries to keep it as open as possible and also doesn't like to license stuff for their Nexus devices - something that other companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony and so on are much more likely to do. We've seen that already a few times in the past.

antonio cesar

keep as open as possible? updating the source with a new tag, because they had to revert some commits because closed source binaries werent correctly updated is that loving to be open?.also where is android wear source?,why dont they open source their proprietory apps? see, nexus devices dont come with aosp pre installed, they come with a proprietary rom that is pretty much aosp but it does have framework modifications, so why dont they open source their own rom?.this is just a fail from google

refthemc

My Lollipop'd Nexus 5 does feel laggier than it did before. I fear it might be the cool animations though 😞

I don't see the issue here? (It's still a tablet that does cool stuff and encrypts my data).

JDC

Aside from the 7 hours that I slept last night, I've been on my Nexus 6 NON-STOP. I haven't noticed anything resembling lag. It's exponentially faster than my N5 with Faux kernel enhancements. Not saying that this is BS, but I thought I'd chime in for people who might be likely to be dissuaded.

Donatom3

Same here, my Nexus 6 is running circles around my 5, also utterly destroys the Nexus 9 in how smooth it feels.

Magnus100

Looks like Google over promised but under delivered.

I'm really not looking forward to updating my Note 4 to Lollipop.

I think I'll wait until all the significant bugs have been addressed.

John Doe

Updating does not enable encryption and besides the note and touchwiz have plenty of bugs on their own.

antifud

"The real question we have to ask is whether or not any of these storage benchmarks really matter on a mobile device."

Are you kidding me? This is absolutely the wrong question to ask.

Are people going to care/will this affect nexus sales when the devices are overpriced? That's the real question.

stedj34

Well that explains the issues arstechnica had in their review...

Adrianus Albert Jonathan Nadea

I don't see an unecrypted 9 result.

Donatom3

Because HTC didn't send ARS an unencrypted Nexus 9, like Moto did for them with the 6.

Jimmy Rocket

This is probably going to spread panic among number junkies (count me in). So thanks for the last section of the article, which brings up a very valid point to consider:

"The real question we have to ask is whether or not any of these storage benchmarks reallymatter on a mobile device. After all, the number of intensive storage I/O operations being done on smartphones and tablets is still relatively low, and some of the situations where NAND slowdowns are really going to have an effect can be offset by holding things in memory."

Considering reviews have complained about how slow the Nexus 6 can be, then yes this is a problem. IMO it's not worth it, I don't keep data on my phone that's so sensitive I'd settle for significantly cut performance for the extra security. I can see why you'd want it for work purposes but other than that

Drewskee

laptops are slower when their drives are encrypted as well. This is nothing new so to claim that this is a flaw in the Nexus 6 is incorrect. ALL Devices running slower once encrypted is "normal".

Why the device is already encrypted is beyond me. That decision should have been left with the customer of the device

Cool

Yes. But the performance difference is a lot less and probably not noticeable in practice on desktop and laptop computers.

The reason being is that most modern RISC CPUs have instructions for cryptography built into them that accelerates it. This isn't the case until ARMv8. I totally agree with you that the decision should have been left with the user. Until Google figures out a way to leverage hardware based encryption, it shouldn't be on by default.

razholio

OK, I can't help myself. I work with linux, encryption and heavy I/O workloads for a living and:
1. if the performance of the I/O layer is below that of the thing doing the encryption, then the encryption will not significantly impact I/O (some latency is unavoidable). This is common with fast CPUs and/or dedicated AES instruction sets, and especially true on the slow-ass ext* on flash that most android devices have. So NO, encryption doesn't necessarily have to impact performance. There are far more important factors ( assumptions like block-size made in the optimizations of the eMMC firmware, filesystem used, I/O scheduler, etc) that determine I/O performance than whether or not the data gets a grinding on its way through the CPU.
2. Nexus devices are great because you have the choice to flash *any* modification WITHOUT voiding your warranty, NOT so you can fix android bugs (though not having to wait for the vendor to release a patch can sometimes be life-saving... we are oh-so-spoiled...), as awesome as that can be at times as well.
3. encryption here is *NOT* a major security boon. Let's look at how this works. powered off, /data is encrypted. good right? maybe. you power it on, enter your passcode and *POOF* /data, while still encrypted on the flash, now has a transparent magic decrypto-window available to see decrypted data just like before 5.0. So what this means, is that the people who used to brute force yer phone either by flashing a recovery or new system, or accessing the flash directly, now have encryption to deal with, while all the 'in-system' attacks via malicious apps, brute-forcing or acquiring your code, or network attack vectors are all just as easy as before. For most people, the single best thing about this encryption is not having to remember to first encrypt their device before factory-reset prior to sale.

awn007

I'm on a nexus 6 right now and from anticdotal evidence of my own. It screams through any thing I have thrown at it.

tralalalalalala37

This is a disaster for google. In order to compete with the iphone's speed they have to remove security features. #androidlaggate

But, it fits with google releasing beta devices to the public. I wonder why oems still ship android when it only makes google more money. Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.

Syndrome666

Honestly this should've been an optional feature just like on the N5, but having spent am hour with N6 at T-Mobile store yesterday and running it side by side with my N5, it's about the same in terms of speed, yes am app or a process may sometimes be a fraction of a second behind, but definitely nothing noticeable if I didn't have my N5 to compare it to. Some stuff is faster on the N6, like talking quicker pictures. Ok Google is usually a bit faster on the unencrypted N5, page loads are identical, loading chrome is identical. Flashlight toggle on is a split second quicker on N5. Overall N6 is still an upgrade over N5, maybe not as drastic out of the box add N5 was over N4, but given that many of us mod and test on these devices, N6 can and does shine in the right hands. To an average user an N6 isn't really an upgrade but more of an option of size over N5, out of the box both perform about the same in a day to day use. Someone who's looking to push the N6 to it's limits will probably mod it in the first place anyhow. I personally love the device, but not sure I really need it since I'm still perfectly happy with my 32gb red N5. N6 is by far the nicest and most comfortable phablet sized phone I've held, I just don't have any need for one, plus not a fan of the current color offerings, would much prefer black or bright red like those of the N5. There's nothing wrong with either phone from an average user perspective, both devices give you near identical experience out of the box

Cool

Yes. It's an upgrade spec wise, but it looks bad when a phone from a year ago outperforms a newer phone from this year, and also costs two times less.

No matter how you slice it. That really does look bad. I agree the performance probably won't be noticed by most people. But you know how the media likes to blow these things up.

Syndrome666

Yes it does, agree 100%. N5 is just too good of a value and doesn't have the encryption preset obstacle like the N6. So yes, out of the box N6 is just a bigger Nexus phone option this time around, and a nexus phone option to Verizon customers. Personally I think making N6 with encryption on as a default setting looks bad on Google's part and really does nothing for the end user unless they have something to hide from the government I suppose, and I doubt such people would even own a smartphone in first place. Meh, I'm more than happy to hold onto my N5 for another year or two, it still does everything I need and has that extra flare when I want to make it my guinea pig. Just knowing that I need to flash am extra boot image to decrypt the N6, kind of turns me off. I want my nexus phones to utilize their fullest potential, and it looks like N6 won't be that device for many people. Google needs to pull their hands out of their ass and make N6 decrypted by default. Don't think I've ever heard anyone complain that their device wasn't encrypted. If this is how Google will release their future devices, I'm not certain most tech heads and devs will be happy about it.

ziplock9000

While it's expected to have a performance hit if you are encrypting or compressing in real-time.. The difference is very bad.

use_the_force

The biggest issue I have with performance on the Nexus 6 is that audio often skips. The easiest way to see this is to set an alarm for a minute or two in the future and then switch the screen off, when the alarm first starts ringing, it will stutter for several seconds. This issue also causes sound to stutter when music is playing too. No idea if this is due to encryption slowdown, but judging by these graphs, even an encrypted Nexus 6 is faster than an unencrypted Nexus 5, so there's some other issue with IO scheduling or something. I haven't seen this reported elsewhere, but have to believe my phone is not the only one with this issue.

16UE

It indeed matters when it took more than 5 minutes for my Xperia Z Ultra Google Play Edition, which was running Lollipop 5.0 with encryption, to give me the phone lock screen after I had provided my encryption unlock pattern. Fortunately for me, the phone also suffered from a hardware issue in which it did not recognize the SIM card any more. Since it was under warranty, Google sent me a replacement running KitKat. I decide to hold off upgrading to Lollipop. By the way, the replacement under KitKat without encryption boots into the lock screen from the press of the power button in 48 seconds.